On Reverting Code that Mma Switches to Raw Input Form Back to Standard Form@Fultz: On one occasion I tracked an error back to a matching quote that got trapped in an italics style box by examining the associated .m file very carefully. Other times the parsing error is more obscure and I'm forced to search for previous versions of the notebook file and re-enter recent modifications. Sometimes I wonder if formatted usage messages are worth the potential headache, although I continue to use them with the hope that these issues will eventually be resolved.

Apr28

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On Reverting Code that Mma Switches to Raw Input Form Back to Standard Form@Fultz: A somewhat related issue that has caused me additional grief on occasion concerns how style boxes are created when moving back and forth between plain text and italic in code cells where I'm using formatted text to define usage messages. Extraneous style boxes (containing no text) can sometimes be found littered throughout the underlying cell expression. Sometimes bizarre and difficult to track down parsing errors are reported by Mma while trying to load a package.

On Reverting Code that Mma Switches to Raw Input Form Back to Standard Form@Fultz: Thanks for the detailed response ... especially the point about commands in the FrontEnd context not really being intended for end-users. (Not clear from this section of the documentation.) Agree that NotebookWrite would be preferable for many applications -- my goal here was simply to convert some code that contained italics, which had mysteriously flipped into raw input form, back to standard input form. Do you have any additional insights in to what causes this behavior in the front-end?

Does an equivalent of marks in vim exist for navigating notebooks quickly?Thanks for the link ... I was envisioning a mark-setting mechanism that would be more immediate and more temporary in nature. For example, if I'm moving between three places in the notebook I'd like to be able to have the cursor bounce between those three locations with just a keystroke or two. Adding, searching, and then deleting comments feels somewhat like a hack and is certainly less convenient than I would prefer but might be worth introducing into my workflow if nothing better exists.

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